Certain applications exist for uranium-base alloys containing small amounts of niobium, for example, U-6Nb. Alloys of this composition have proven difficult to prepare. Direct alloying as by combining plates or pieces of the metals and melting in a vacuum induction furnace has not been effective owing to a lack of compositional control in the resulting cast product. An expensive and inefficient double arc melting process has been used to obtain alloys of controlled composition. Another approach employed, where U-Nb alloy scrap is being recycled and combined with additional amounts of uranium and niobium, includes multiple steps of combining the U-6Nb alloy scrap with the stoichiometric amount of uranium required for producing a half-round bar slab of uranium-2 wt. % niobium alloy and melting the mixture by vacuum induction melting, stacking the resulting U-2Nb alloy bars with slabs of niobium metal into a sandwich-type electrode, arc melting the electrode, and arc melting a second time to form a billet of U-6Nb. This combination of double arc melting and vacuum induction heating produces a satisfactory product that makes use of recycled scrap but is unduly complicated and expensive. A simpler process that avoids such multiple steps and that avoids any need for arc melting would be highly advantageous over the previously used processes.